By Marilyn Ferdinand
If ever a great director ended their career on a high, prototypical
note, it was Luis Buñuel. I’ve always said that everything Buñuel was
about as a filmmaker is in his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire. Among his many dreamscapes—from his early, surrealistic L’Âge d’Or to his mysterious, blasphemous Viridiana and kinky sex farce Belle de Jour—That Obscure Object of Desire
must be seen as Buñuel’s ultimate dream, the final, clear telling of
the story of his inner life. It recycles his trademark obsessions almost
as jokes on himself and his fans and foretells that this will be the
last time he and his anima will spar on camera.
We are barely into the film before Buñuel dispenses a couple of his
trademark flourishes. Opening shots of Seville segue to a large home as
its master, Mateo Fabert (Fernando Rey, Buñuel’s marvelously pompous
alter ego in a number of films), walks through a red, upholstered door
into an ornate bedroom and instructs his valet (Andre Weber) to burn a
blood-stained pillow he is picking off the floor. “Burn it all!” he says
in disgust, as the valet picks up and shows Buñuel’s favorite fetish
objects—a pair of high-heeled shoes and a pair of lace panties.
Mateo has decided to leave for Paris, and climbs in his large
American car to be driven to the train station. We see another man get
into a chauffeur-driven car and a close-up of the car ignition. With one
turn of the key, the car explodes in a ball of fire. “They’re even
here,” Mateo says, in a “there goes the neighborhood” manner, of the
terrorists who will plague the film. As he boards the first-class train
carriage, it fills with people he knows—a neighbor (Milena Vukotic)
traveling with her young daughter and a judge (Julien Bertheau) who is a
friend of his cousin’s. Last into his car is a dwarf—a psychologist
whom the judge knows from the courthouse, where he gives expert
testimony. As Mateo looks out the window, he sees a woman (Carole
Bouquet), black-eyed and forehead bandaged, striding along the platform
looking into each carriage. We see him hand some money to a reluctant
train porter, who goes into the toilet and emerges with a bucket. When
the woman reaches Mateo, the object of her search, he dumps the full
bucket of water on her head. She brushes at the water with disgust,
throws her suitcase to the ground, and boards the nearest carriage. This
act provokes the curiosity of Mateo’s carriagemates, and they listen
with relish as he relates the story of “the worst woman on the earth.”
Mateo met Conchita when she was engaged to serve as his maid. She
knew nothing about being a maid and had hands too delicate to have done
serious housework. Smitten, Mateo made plans to seduce her that very
night, but was politely rebuffed by Conchita (now played by Angela
Molina). Upon arising the next day, he learns that the object of his
desire has quit and left for parts unknown. He loses her and runs into
her by chance a couple of times, first in a nightclub, where she is
working as a coat checker, and later, in Lausanne, when he is robbed of
exactly 800 francs by a couple of young men, and finds out Conchita was
behind the robbery to get them only what they needed to buy train
tickets back to Paris. He tells her to keep the money she tries to
return and extracts her address in Paris, a humble flat on an ancient
block of buildings that she shares with her religious, widowed mother,
Encarnación (Maria Asquerino) who is too bourgeois and useless to work.
Mateo becomes their benefactor, and eventually the coy Conchita
agrees to be his mistress in his rarely used home on the outskirts of
Paris. Their encounter at his estate is a teasing comedy in which
Conchita is disturbed by the photo of Mateo’s late wife in the bedroom
they are to occupy and insists on another room. Once there, Conchita
tantalizes Mateo by exposing her breasts, only to reveal that she is
wearing a garment that amounts to a chastity belt. They take up
residence in the villa, but Mateo catches her sneaking one of the young
men with whom she was traveling into her bedroom. For the rest of the
movie, Conchita will toy with Mateo, dancing naked for some tourists in a
cabaret where she is employed, and wheedling the deed to a lavish home
in Seville, only to lock him out, curse his very existence, and make
love to a young man in the courtyard while Mateo watches briefly in
fascinated horror.
And perhaps predictably, even after relating the entire story to his
captive audience, he and Conchita disembark the train and go off
together on a shopping spree. After viewing yet another Buñuel
trademark, a seamstress sewing a rend in a lace garment Conchita has
left with her (reminiscent of Arturo de Córdova’s character’s plan to
sew his wife’s vagina closed to prevent her from straying in El), the pair walks off, only to be obscured by the smoke and debris of the explosion that ends the movie.
In his wonderful autobiography, My Last Sigh, Buñuel writes at length about his lifelong fascination with dreams and imagination. That Obscure Object of Desire
is, I believe, his most completely realized dream. Despite the
resemblance to reality that is Mateo’s train journey, Buñuel has
populated it with the ultimate dream cliché—a dwarf, who, humorously, is
a psychiatrist trying to analyze Mateo’s experiences with Conchita—as
well as people he knows in some way, as we all do in our dreams.
Buñuel, born in Spain, adopted France as his home and returned to
work there in his last years after many years in Mexico, during which he
became a Mexican citizen. The director actually has two
mistresses—France and Spain—to which he feels affinity, if not fidelity,
creating an unstable situation. But it seems to me that what he is
really trying to do is to join harmoniously his male aspect and his
female anima; this explains why he can’t just break with Conchita with
resolute finality, for which of us can truly escape ourselves.
He doesn’t understand his female aspect. She is constantly changing,
signified not only by the two actresses who share one role, but also by
their different levels of refinement. Carole Bouquet, the face of the
most chic couture house in the world, Chanel, is effortlessly beautiful,
sophisticated, and importantly, French. Angela Molina is earthy, more
brazenly sensual, and Spanish. The language Buñuel chooses for the film
is French, but he dubs both actresses with a third one, confusing the
issue even further. Buñuel dubs Rey with Michel Piccoli to bring
perfection to Mateo, who is called Mathieu in many reviews and
subtitling, though we can clearly hear Conchita call him Mateo. The
duality of Buñuel’s expatriate status, therefore, also is acknowledged.
For once, Buñuel gives his antipathy toward the Catholic Church a bit
of a rest, even though he ascribes most of the terrorist attacks to the
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Again, this seems like an
in-joke, a way to get one of his trademark themes out of the way so he
can focus his attention on his main project of reconciling the duality
in himself.
His anima entices him with words of love, pursues him when he rejects
her, deceives and berates him, and tells him she doesn’t need his money
and can’t be bought. When he calls her the worst woman on the earth, he
is actually chiding himself, seeing the native intelligence, integrity,
and mischief in himself in terms of his feminine aspect. Does he want
to dominate her? Would he if she yielded to him? That, Buñuel seems to
suggest, could never happen. The final scene—the closing of the symbolic
vagina—leads to an explosion we can assume causes Conchita’s and
Mateo’s annihilation. Perhaps this is Buñuel closing the book on his
career and life, feeling that a final reconciliation of the anima and
animus can come only in death—or at least, he won’t be making any more
movies trying to work on the problem.
Otto Rank is one of the many psychologists whose theories come up
frequently when looking at Buñuel (much to the director’s amusement,
claiming his imagination was not a subject for psychoanalytic study). In
looking at this Wikipedia passage about Rank, however, you don’t have
to be Fellini, so to speak, to figure out Buñuel:
On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long
oscillation between the two “poles of fear” can be made more bearable,
according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts
one’s uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the
creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from
the other. Living fully requires “seeking at once isolation and union”
(Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both
simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to
be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living
emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting,
space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said
Rank in Art and Artist, “originate solely in the constructive
harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life” (1932/1989, p.
xxii).
That Obscure Object of Desire moves in a dreamlike way, its
flashback structure encouraging the mixture of reality and imagination
(as Buñuel said “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading
our memories”) that becomes a dream truth. The switching between Molina
and Bouquet is confusing, disorienting, further plunging the viewer into
the undersea world of the unconscious. That’s when the great director
is most effective in weaving his magic, a truthful untruth we are
seduced into following to its illogically logical conclusion. l
"Planet Homebuddies" follows the cosmopolitan travails of six friends living together in a Shanghai loft, and will debut on leading Chinese VOD sites Youku, iQiyi and SINA next month
HONG KONG -- Chinese audiences will soon get chance to see what a 21st-century Chinese take on Friends looks like, when a six-part sitcom makes its debut on the country’s major internet portals before the traditional Lunar New Year holidays begin in earnest next month.
Boasting a theme song from the Rembrandt’s Danny Wilde -- who wrote the now-unforgettable “I’ll Be There For You” number that opened each episode of Friends -- the new show, Planet Homebuddies, revolves around the lives and loves of six middle-class urban Chinese characters who live together in one big loft, counting among them a failed advertising executive, an IT specialist, a DJ and an art curator. STORY: Elite and Metan to Co-Produce Model Competition for Chinese TV
The title refers to their work-from-home lifestyle, according to the series’ producers Mei Tian Mei Yu, the makers of the weekly Chinese-language program Hello Hollywood. “Mei Tian has been keeping a close eye on the cultural trends developing among China’s youth,” commented Mei Tian’s president Jean Zhang.
“We noticed that working around the clock on weekdays and hanging out with friends on weekends is how most of today’s youth in China live their lives, with more and more adopting a ‘homebody’ lifestyle. Our new series will serve as the voice of today’s 20- to 30-year-old set in China, and examine this emerging trend.”
According to Mei Tian, the series’ release on online portals Youku, iQiyi and SINA is expected to reach over 800 million unique monthly viewers when it is launched around the so-called Golden Week that begins the Chinese Lunar New Year.
The company also said the series will have specifically designed content for smartphones and tablets, and its web origins will help in using the internet to pilot Mei Tian’s domestic and international TV projects. The company is in the process of finishing Chinese Girl, a localized version of the U.S. series Gossip Girl starring Mini Yang, one of the country’s most prominent young actresses. VIDEO: Behind the Scenes of Gossip Girl's 100th Episode
“The internet audience in China is used to longer-form programming than what we see from Western audiences. Couple that with the sheer size of the potential audience and it provides an ideal testing ground for TV piloting,” according to Larry Namer, president and CEO of Metan Development Group, the strategic consultant to Planet Homebuddies.
Arsinée Khanjian (born 1958 in Beirut, Lebanon Արսինե Խանջյան) is an Armenian-Canadian actress and producer. She is married to Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who regularly casts her in his films, in addition to her independent work and stage roles. She has a bachelor's degree in French and Spanish from Concordia University and a master's degree in political science from the University of Toronto. Her husband, Egoyan, credits her for inspiring him to further explore his Armenian roots. She lives in Toronto with her husband and their son, Arshile.
